Warble

Realtime for your Flarum forum — one paste, done. flarum-warble connects your forum to Warble, a hosted realtime service built for Flarum: live discussions, typing indicators, and presence over WebSockets, without running your own socket server or wrestling with Pusher clusters and message caps.

How it works

Warble is a thin companion to flarum/realtime — realtime does all the work (live discussions, typing, presence); Warble just points it at the managed Warble websocket service so you never run a websocket daemon or edit any config.

1. composer require linkrobins/flarum-warble, then enable Realtime and Warble in the admin panel.
2. Paste your Warble key (from your linkrobins.com dashboard → Warble) into the one field on the Warble settings page.
3. Done. Warble exchanges the key for your connection config and writes flarum/realtime's websocket block into your forum's config.php (js-client, php-client, app-key/secret) — pointed at wss://warble-{you}.linkrobins.com. The connection is handled for you — no hosts, ports, or keys to configure.

Realtime's own feature settings stay yours: typing indicators, discussion-list typing dots, list update interval, notification toast duration, and the "view who is typing" permission. We encourage you to open the Realtime settings page and tune those to fit your forum — Warble never touches them.

Leave the key blank to disconnect. Outgrow the managed service? No lock-in: flarum/realtime ships its own websocket daemon (php flarum realtime:serve) — disconnect Warble and run the stock daemon on your own server any time.

Requirement: your forum's config.php must be writable by the web server (it is on a standard Flarum install). Warble writes the connection there because that's where flarum/realtime reads it — the change takes effect immediately, no restart. If config.php is locked down, Warble tells you in the settings page.

Troubleshooting: the settings page says "This extension has no configuration"

That page means your forum is serving an outdated compiled assets build, one made before Warble was enabled, so the key field literally isn't in the JavaScript your browser receives. This happens on some shared hosts when Flarum's post-enable cache flush fails; reinstalling, purging, or clearing your browser cache won't fix it, because the stale build lives on the server.

Warble now repairs this by itself: it checks the served build on admin page loads and rebuilds it when it predates Warble. If it can't (or another extension's script crashes the page before Warble loads), a red banner appears at the bottom of the admin panel explaining exactly what's wrong in plain language, with a one-click fix where possible. No SSH needed. If the banner says the assets folder isn't writable, that part is for your hosting provider.

Why Warble over raw Pusher

• Flat, predictable pricing — from $49/year (Pusher's entry is $49/month), unlimited messages.
• Flarum-native — no Pusher account, no cluster config; one key.
• Outgrow it? No lock-in. flarum/realtime bundles its own websocket daemon — disconnect Warble and run php flarum realtime:serve on your own server; your forum keeps every realtime feature.

Licensing

This extension is MIT-licensed and free. Warble itself is a hosted service by Link Robins — it is not a self-hostable product; see https://linkrobins.com/warble. If you'd rather self-host realtime, you don't need Warble at all: that's just flarum/realtime in its stock form, running its own bundled daemon.

Built by Link Robins.